What happens when you believe something whether it’s true or not? During this time of year, children everywhere are engaging in the debate whether Santa Claus is real or not. The word “believe” became my favorite word many years ago during Christmas. It carries a child-like wonder of the magical holiday season that I found irresistible {Josh Grobin’s Believe says it all}. I remember when my children were little I would tell them “when you stop believing the magic stops”. Those words couldn’t be truer today. I’m wondering what you might be debating is real. What do you find your mind wandering to time and again?

What you believe shapes your life

I’m not talking about some Pollyanna{unrealistic} type of belief but the belief that gives us hope, purpose, joy, and yes the magic to keep moving forward when we feel like we can’t go on any further. When I divorced in 2013, I left a painful 21 year marriage and although my life was starting over, it was falling apart. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience? I held on to my word “believe” tighter than ever and had no idea at the time the true impact it would have on me until now.

The power of what you believe

It wasn’t until I started really digging into research on what we believe that I fully understood how transformational our beliefs are.

For example, have you ever believed something to be true and later found out it wasn’t? The promise, the warranty, the results, etc. wasn’t true? It’s so disappointing. What if you believed something about yourself that wasn’t true? Like I shared in the video, there were things I believed about myself that weren’t true. Those things came with a very heavy price. But this is what I learned; I get to choose what I believe about myself, my life, my abilities and my future. You get to choose too, yay you!

This is where “when you stop believing, the magic stops” whether what you believe is true or not. If you’ve been believing a lie and stop believing it, that magic power to hold you back and keep you stuck in life no longer can. On the contrary, if you stop believing in something that brings joy, hope or the ability to keep you working towards your goals, the magic stops. What you believe is powerful, even magical, whether it’s good or bad.

Choose a success word to carry you through 2018

Have you noticed how people and things are “labeled”? All around us in advertising, social media, our professional and personal conversations and even the pulpit. whatever we’re talking about is labeled as good, bad, better, best, helpful, toxic, new, old, outdated, right and wrong. It’s exhausting! How do you want to be labeled? You get to label yourself, yay you again!

Instead of setting New Year’s resolutions, or in addition to them how about you pick a word that represents who you want to be or how you want to feel in 2018? Here’s how it works: say you’re going back to school to finish your degree and you have some anxiety about keeping up with your studies on top of all your other commitments, you’d choose a word such as “growth” or “perseverance”. Or you want to lose the baby weight from your last pregnancy, you could choose a word like “strong” or “committed”. Do you see how a word can change how you feel about approaching something that’s a difficult challenge?